Mark Dodosh Blog

They're j/k'ing, right?

Unless you've been living under a rock lately, you know the newspaper industry is in trouble, with sagging circulation and ad revenue.
But I have a way to save the newspaper industry, or at least the folks on the ground floor dealing with the turmoil: collusion allegations!!
Ya see, newspaper companies clearly have been losing millions upon millions in a savage attempt to keep the grunts — bloggers, reporters, page designers and copy editors just like your neighborhood SportsBiz — from making too much money.
Wait. That's ludicrous, you say? Newspapers, rather, are losing money because of declining advertising across the country and this here Internet thing?
I'm shocked.
Here I thought the collusion allegations by baseball and basketball players were very well thought out, reasoned arguments and not simply a defense mechanism to those players' gravy trains being stopped dead in their respective tracks.
Collusion, as I've written in this space before, is an absolute joke, especially during the worst economic climate in, oh, 70 years. Yet there are player reps from both basketball and baseball shouting for anyone to hear:
Billy Hunter, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, in response to the league's dire economic predictions: “If it later turns out that the league did not have a good-faith basis for making these projections, the NBPA will pursue all available legal remedies, including a treble damages claim for collusion.”
Baseball agent Seth Levinson: “There are too many things that need to be explained. In my experience, there are no coincidences in a monopoly.”
Baseball agent Jeff Borris: “There's a general level of suspicion in the air.”
Suspicion that baseball commissioner Bud Selig is artificially decreasing attendance numbers?
Suspicion that NBA teams aren't actually losing money, that David Stern is just making it up? (They're apparently eager to forget that it's clearly in Stern's best interest for his teams to make money, which in turn would allow the players to earn more money.)
As I've written, player salaries have gone down; there's no doubt about that.
There's also a very good reason for that.
Collusion allegations: Where insensitivity to the other 99.99999% of the human race happens!
Feel free to e-mail me with comments, questions or criticisms.